{"id":832819,"date":"2026-11-13T01:16:13","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T01:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/832819\/"},"modified":"2026-11-13T01:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T01:16:13","slug":"the-1980s-hit-grace-slick-thought-she-was-too-old-to-sing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/832819\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1980s hit Grace Slick thought she was too old to sing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img width=\"1140\" height=\"855\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Grace-Slick-Musician-1987-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\" class=\"attachment-single-feature size-single-feature wp-post-image\" alt=\"Grace Slick - Musician - 1987\" layout=\"fill\"  style=\"object-position: 50% 20%\" loading=\"eager\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Grace Slick \u2013 Musician \u2013 1987 \u2013 Far Out Magazine c<\/p>\n<p> November 12th, 2026 \u00b7 8:30pm GMT <\/p>\n<p>Attempting to dose Richard Nixon with LSD, belting the standout set for Woodstock, and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Janis Joplin, back in her 1960s heyday, <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/tags\/grace-slick\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">Grace Slick<\/a> was a veritable icon of counterculture hippiedom but, by the time the 1980s rolled around, the \u2018Acid Queen\u2019 had become a reluctant stalwart of mainstream soft rock. <\/p>\n<p>Rock and roll has always been a young person\u2019s game and, in many ways, it was Slick\u2019s generation of tripped-out hippie rockers that cemented that reputation, but some rockstars deal with the ageing process better than others. <\/p>\n<p>While there is almost always a decline in quality once rock musicians reach middle age and above, some are content to live out their days wheeling out anniversary tours and greatest hits records while others, like Grace Slick, <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/tour-made-bruce-springsteen-want-drop-his-anthem\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">stick to their principles<\/a> and throw in the towel completely. <\/p>\n<p>After a brief reunion with her old Jefferson Airplane bandmates, she retired from the musical realm back in 1990, at the age of 50, declaring that rock and roll is tied to youth, and older performers look ludicrous onstage. \u201cAs soon as your chin doesn\u2019t go with your face, when you turn it real fast, it\u2019s time to get out of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll,\u201d she once said of the comparatively elderly Rolling Stones. <\/p>\n<p>While Slick\u2019s retirement was a matter of principle for the vocalist, it is difficult to forget that she spent much of the 1990s shilling out Starship records that, while incredibly successful in a commercial sense, were as <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/grace-slick-worst-song-ever\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">vapid and lifeless <\/a>as they come. By her own admission, she hated Starship\u2019s defining hit \u2018We Built This City\u2019, but that 1985 single certainly wasn\u2019t the band\u2019s own offending effort. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t like to sing songs where I don\u2019t believe the lyrics,\u201d the vocalist once shared in an interview. That ethos made things rather tricky during her Starship years, though, particularly when she was presented with a song like \u2018Nothing\u2019s Gonna Stop Us Now\u2019. <\/p>\n<p>A ubiquitous mid-1980s power ballad featuring the kind of deliberately diffuse lyrics present in virtually every mainstream love song throughout the century, courtesy of Diane Warren and Albert Hammond. \u201cDiane Warren is an amazing pop songwriter, and she, I\u2019m assuming, believes in that state where you\u2019re in love, you get kind of crazy,\u201d Slick theorised. <\/p>\n<p>Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n<p>In case you couldn\u2019t pick up on the tone of that quote, the vocalist does not believe in such a state. \u201cI\u2019m older now,\u201d she said. \u201cI am damn near 50, and I\u2019m singing, \u2018Nothing\u2019s gonna stop us now.\u2019\u201d Once that realisation dawned upon the vocalist, it was only a matter of time before she escaped the clutches of Starship, and the music industry as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>Inevitably, the song reached number one both in the US and the UK, becoming one of the most ubiquitous tracks of the 1980s in the process. However, it was the beginning of the end for Grace Slick, who left Starship shortly thereafter. The band itself carried on for a number of years, producing the bizarrely named 1989 album Love Among the Cannibals, but Slick stuck to her guns and went her own way, using her retirement from the music industry to focus on the other <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/grace-slick-artistic-odes-to-alice-in-wonderland\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">great love of her life: painting<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>  <a class=\"fw\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/preferences\/source?q=https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" style=\"\"> ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"28\" height=\"28\" src=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\" alt=\"\"\/> <\/a>  The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter<\/p>\n<p>All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.<br \/>Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grace Slick \u2013 Musician \u2013 1987 \u2013 Far Out Magazine c November 12th, 2026 \u00b7 8:30pm GMT Attempting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":832820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[30275,205067,58176,96,76394,116256,128,103157,160393,37060,4389,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-832819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1980s","tag-205067","tag-classic-rock","tag-entertainment","tag-grace-slick","tag-jefferson-airplane","tag-music","tag-pop-rock","tag-psych-rock","tag-rock-and-roll","tag-starship","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}